President Obama Says ‘Made in America’ at Heart of US Recovery

“As long as I’m president, I’m going to keep fighting night and day to make sure that we win those jobs, that those are jobs that are created right here in the United States of America — (applause) — and that your members are put to work.

So the message I want to deliver to our competitors and to those in Washington who’ve tried to block our progress at every step of the way is that we are going to rebuild this economy stronger than before. And at the heart of it are going to be three powerful words: Made in America. (Applause.) Made in America.”

President Obama and congressional Democrats — out of options for another quick shot of stimulus spending to revive the sluggish economy — are shifting toward a longer-term strategy that promises to tackle persistently high unemployment by engineering a renaissance in American manufacturing.

That approach, heralded by Obama last week in Detroit and sketched out in a memo to House Democrats as they headed home for the August break, is still evolving and so far focuses primarily on raising taxes on multinational corporations that Democrats accuse of shipping jobs overseas.

The strategy also repackages policies long pursued by the White House — such as investing in clean energy, roads, bridges and broadband service — with more than two dozen legislative proposals aimed at developing a plan for promoting domestic manufacturing.

When asked about prospective economic solutions, pro-manufacturing policies won overwhelming support across demographics including non-union households, independents, union households and Tea Party supporters. …

Other highlights from the poll include:

• A majority believe the U.S. no longer has the world’s strongest economy—a title they want to regain
• Voters are anxious about the economy—specifically China debt, spending and loss of manufacturing
• 86% of voters want Washington to focus on manufacturing, and 63% feel working people who make things are being forgotten while Wall Street and banks get bailouts
• Two-thirds of voters believe manufacturing is central to our economic strength, and 57% believe manufacturing is more central to our economic strength than high-tech, knowledge or financial service sectors

The AFL-CIO blog has more on the President’s address (full transcript here) in the post, Obama Says ‘Made in America’ at Heart of US Recovery, (yes, I flat-out stole the title of this post from them)

Speaking on his 49th birthday at the Washington (D.C) Convention Center, the president told the council that this fall’s election is a choice between

polices that encourage job creation here in America or encourage jobs to go elsewhere…The choice is whether we want to go forward or we want to go backwards to the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

He spoke about the need to invest in clean technology, like solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear plants, clean coal and new car batteries.

Instead of giving tax breaks to corporations that want to ship jobs overseas, we want to give tax breaks to companies that are investing right here in the United States of America.

Note – the President also said, “And we are going to keep on fighting to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.”

About Dave Johnson

Dave has more than 20 years of technology industry experience. His earlier career included technical positions, including video game design at Atari and Imagic. He was a pioneer in design and development of productivity and educational applications of personal computers. More recently he helped co-found a company developing desktop systems to validate carbon trading in the US.